I have to admit that I was a bit surprised when I found out that some users wanted to know what to do in this case because Ubuntu does not usually give problems when reading external drives, but anything can happen. ¿What do we do if our Ubuntu PC has decided not to read an external hard drive or a pendrive? Most likely, we will have to use the command line to install a package that allows us to read practically any external drive.
As a general rule, external hard drives or pen drives are formatted in NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT. The Linux kernel already allows us to read FAT32 natively, as well as other more common formats in Linux such as ext3 or ext4. Problems can appear when what we are trying is read a drive formatted in NTFS or exFAT. Below we explain how to install the necessary packages to be able to access drives formatted in these formats.
How to read a hard drive formatted in NTFS or exFAT
Before commenting on what to install to be able to read this type of units, I would like to make a recommendation: the first thing we will have to do is check that the unit works, and this we can do using it on another computer, especially if that computer uses Windows. I explain this because we cannot rule out that the unit is not working, has "died" and we have to use other methods to recover it.
In most cases, Ubuntu it should have no problem reading a drive formatted in NTFS because it already has the necessary package installed by default. Is about ntfs-3g, a package that, if we have uninstalled it or it has been bothered by whatever, we can install / reinstall by opening a terminal and typing the command:
sudo apt install ntfs-3g
Which not installed by default is the package necessary to freely manage the content of a drive formatted in exFAT. It's about the package exfat fuse and we will install it by opening a terminal and typing the command:
sudo apt install exfat-fuse
Have you already managed to read that hard drive that was resisting you?